About This House

The company behind it

Tallyhouse LLC publishes Tallyhouse. The company is registered with the Wisconsin Department of Financial Institutions.

Letters are read Monday to Thursday between 10 am and 4 pm Central. A reply takes two working days and sometimes three, because a question about a wall is usually answered by going to look at it.

No state registration number is printed on this site, and no federal tax number, because neither is any reader's business and neither is required to identify a publisher.

What is published

One catalogue of eight materials, five short pages describing the making groups, and four articles on the making itself. That is the whole publication. It is not a magazine, it does not issue numbers, it has no volumes, and it does not appear on a schedule. When an entry is corrected, the date at the foot of the page moves.

Whose hand is on it

The house does. There is no byline on this site and no author persona, and that is deliberate rather than coy: the entries are compiled from published sources and from what can be seen from a public sidewalk, and attaching a name to that work would suggest an authority the work does not have.

Letters are read and answered by whoever is at the desk during posted hours, and a correction is credited by initial only unless somebody asks otherwise.

How an entry is put together

1. A material is identified as one that has a plane visible from a public sidewalk somewhere in this city.
2. The three cells are answered first, before any prose: which bed or works, how it was dressed, how it got here. If any of the three cannot be answered, the entry is not written. The program that builds this site refuses to lay a page for an entry with a missing cell, which is a check rather than a promise.
3. The published record is read. For this subject that means the state geological survey's bulletins on building stone and on the clays of the state from the eighteen nineties and nineteen hundreds, both of which print maps with dates on them; fire insurance atlases of this city from the same period, which color a wall by its material; and National Register nominations, which describe fabric carefully because they have to.
4. What cannot be established is left out, and where a claim would need a building opened up, the entry says so instead of guessing.

The refusals, as policy

Tallyhouse is a publication. It does not sell, quote, price, survey or repair anything, does not supply building material, does not recommend a trade, and arranges no travel of any kind.

More specifically, and because this subject sits next door to a trade:

• No assessment of any particular building, standing or otherwise
• No opinion on whether any wall is sound
• No quotation, estimate, price or specification for any work
• No naming or recommending of any mason, supplier, contractor or consultant
• No entering of anybody's property, and nothing opened up
• No material offered for sale, by this house or through it

The one commercial arrangement that does exist is a commission on a single fare form, described in full in how this is paid for.

Why the masthead is not the domain

Because the two words in the domain would both have to be used badly to be used at all. One of them is the everyday address of an unrelated publication in the same field, and using it would put this catalogue on top of somebody else's name. The other is the name of a plant, and this publication does not take a living thing as a masthead.

So the masthead is Tallyhouse, the company is Tallyhouse LLC, and the domain is only an address. Neither word from the domain appears anywhere in the writing on this site.